Lingering in a gallery of the Italian Renaissance, National Gallery, Washington, DC

 

One year, I must have drunk a lot because, when we landed in Rome, all I saw on the way into the city was the city’s name backwards:  amoR.

 

Then I understood that Venus had met our flight.  

We were in her domain. 

 

 

 

Venus with a Mirror, oil on canvas, 1555

Titian, 1490-1576, Venetian.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

 

The National Gallery, Washington DC has surrounded its Venus with four men and two women and the god Dionysos as child.

 

A third woman of the same period is in an adjoining gallery.

 

 

Venus, the goddess of sensuality, eroticism, desire, love, fertility.

 

Venus has pearls in her hair and her ears, a gold band inset with jewels around one wrist; and around the other, a gold chain wound round and round.

 

Her cape of silk velvet is trimmed with two kinds of fur, its silver and gold clasp pressing invitingly against the semicircle of her pubic hair. 

 

Her son, Cupid reaches to put a tiara of myrtle in her hair. The plant is sacred to her.

 

 

 

As above

 

Your eye is drawn diagonally across the canvas from the pale gold of her hair in the top left corner

down her magnificent nakedness to the loose gold of her bracelet

 

 

As above

 

and then to the gold organza sash across the putto (possibly Anteros, Cupid’s brother) to the silk stripes of gold and brown under his  feet in the bottom right hand corner.

 

A breathtaking portrait.

 

The infant Bacchus is enchanted at the sight of the goddess. 

Transported.

 

He is the archetype of eternal life and she – love, eroticism, fertility – embodies the mechanisms of that archetype for our species….

 

 

 

The Infant Bacchus, c. 1505/10; oil on panel transferred to panel.

  Giovanni Bellini, 1430-1516, Venice. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

 

The men, however, who surround Venus in this gallery are melancholic.  Morose. Pouty.

 

 

 

Portrait of Lorenzo di Credi, 1488, oil on panel transferred to canvas. 

Pietro Perugino, Umbrian, 1450-1523. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

 

 

Portrait of a Man on panel, 1527-1530. 

Attributed to Dosso Dossi, Ferrarese, active 1512-1542.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

He is offering the goddess a sprig of her sacred myrtle.  

 

And the young man below ran in from the rain to catch a glimpse of Venus. 

Mesmerised.

 

 

 

Portrait of a Youth, oil on panel, c. 1485

Fillipino Lippi, Florentine, 1457-1504.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

Cardinal Bandinello Sauli is watching Venus,  his head inclined to his secretary.

 

 

Cardinal Bandinello Sauli, His Secretary and Two Geographers, oil on panel, 1516. 

Sebastiano del Piombo, 1485-1547, Venetian.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

He himself is distracted by the presence of the goddess. 

 

 

As above

 

Melancholic.  Pensive. On the way to downhearted. 

 

His  fingers he keeps short of the bell of his authority and of a call to order.

 

He pays no attention to the fly showing up the whiteness of his white gown. 

 

 

As above

 

 

And the Wise Virgin, in Marian blue, inclines her head towards the cardinal as if waiting to hear if he is going to say something about the cavorting of naked women. 

 

 

Portrait of a Young Woman as a Wise Virgin, oil on panel c. 1510. 

Sebastiano del Piombo, Venetian, 1485-1547.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

She is watching Venus. 

Everyone is watching Venus.

 

And as to this fabulously fashionable woman who thought she would capture every gaze with her flaxen hair crowned with silver mesh netted with seed pearl, 

she saw Venus and turned away. 

Her expression is of faint exasperation. 

 

But not defeat because she thinks her time will come when the goddess has gone away…. 

 

It is she who has gone away and Venus who is with us still.

 

 

 

 Portrait of a Lady, tempera on panel, c. 1485

Neroccio De’Landi, 1447-1500, Italian, Sienna.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

Only Ginevra de’ Benci is holding her own without undue emotion.

She is there, alert, calm and certainly not lowering her eyes. 

 

 

Ginevra de’ Benci, oil on panel, and detail, c. 1474-78.

 

And, of course, her creator is Leonardo da Vinci.  No need for a lowering of eyes.

 

She was said to be a woman of formidable intellect; and the reverse of the painting  links her beauty and her virtue.

 

This is thought to be a commissioned portrait by a male acquaintance with whom she had a platonic relationship.

 

But, it is hundreds of years later and it is Venus whom we remember and not Ginevra de’ Benci.

 

 

Front and reverse

Ginevra de’ Benci, oil on panel, and detail, c. 1474-78. 

Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519, Florentine.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

And as for the young Farnese heir with his slashed silk-on-silk jacket, crimson with silver thread: 

he is around the corner from his Renaissance companions.  He hangs on his own wall.  He cannot see Venus.

 

 

as below

 

He is young yet.

His head filled with tales of the Knights Templar:  their 8-pointed Cross of Malta woven into his heavy, fur-trimmed silk coat;

he has been held in his magnificent frame, boy-size sword in scabbard, for the duration.

 

 

Rannucio Farnese, oil on canvas, 1592. 

Titian, 1490-1576, Venetian.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

 

 

 

You wonder what is going on in this gallery.

 

Here it seems is a representation of our two great cultural legacies in tension with and recognition of each other:

the classical Greek/Roman and the Judeo/Christian.

 

The Olympians were overtaken by Christianity.

 

The Olympian archetypes pushed under and overlain by Christian verities;

 

Olympian volcanic appetites, amorality, promiscuities, careless cruelties, creative insight, world-making generosities brought into orderly propriety and proper order.

 

Everyone knew the scandal of Cupid’s birth:

 

 

Venus and Vulcan, c. 1545, ink over charcoal, heightened with white on blue paper.  Tintoretto, 1519-1594, Venetian.

Kupferstichkabinett, Staatlich Museen zu Berlin on loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC in 2019 

 

Vulcan, the blacksmith god, has surprised his wife, Venus, with her lover, Mars, the war god.

Vulcan is inspecting Venus’ thighs for evidence of sexual activity. 

 

 

Mars, Cupid’s father, is  hiding and trying to hush the dog.  

 

 

Venus’ companions in these galleries  lived under the Christian hegemony. 

 

 

This woman is a good Christian girl.

You can see the slight pinch of a judgement forming on her lips; the skeptical evaluation in her eyes;

the lack of ostentatious jewellery; the hair pulled back and plaited.

 

 

 detail of Portrait of a Young Woman as a Wise Virgin, oil on panel c. 1510.

Sebastiano del Piombo, Venetian, 1485-1547.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

And the cardinal, a learned man, has spent years of his life dealing with the tension between the Classics and the Judaeo/Christian scriptures. He is chagrined.

 

“We aren’t winning.” he thinks as he watches Venus.

 

 

detail of Cardinal Bandinello Sauli, His Secretary and Two Geographers, and detail, oil on panel, 1516.

Sebastiano del Piombo, 1485-1547, Venetian.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

He knows that the link – which is in the DNA of Sapiens – between love and desire and eroticism

can be intimidated into suppression,

threatened with damnation,

camouflaged,

sacralized,  

deflected, 

intellectualized,

suborned,

subliminized. 

 

But only for so long. 

 

These verbs are not in Venus’ lexicon and she won’t be suppressed. 

She shimmers like an oasis in parched country.

 

 

 

Venus, 1967; mixed media.

 Jana Zelibska, Czech born 1945, Czech.  On loan to the International Pop exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2016.

 

 

She has been erupting periodically since the Christian hegemony began. 

 

She erupted in the studio of Matisse not long before he died.

 

 

Venus, 1952, gouache on paper, cut and pasted on white paper, mounted on paper panel. 

Henri Matisse, 1869-1954, French.  National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

Her last major eruption seems to have been in the mid-1960s during the resurgence of the French ‘May 1968’, and the Flower Power era of the mid-1960s and 1970s in Anglo-America.

 

Here she is in 1967 expressing her fondest, erotic affection for the many aromas and colours of Sapiens. 

 

Venere degli Stracci (Venus of the Rags), marble and rags, 1967. 

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Italian born 1933.  Cittadelarte – Fondazione Pistoletto on loan to the Philadelphia Art Museum in 2011

 

 

And here with Robert Rauschenberg: we are always in her sight as she is in ours.  

 

 

Persimmon, 1964, oil and silkscreen-ink print on canvas. 

Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008, American. Private collection on loan to MOMA , NY in 2017

 

 

And this 1823 statue of Venus was, in 2000, the subject again of  a work created for the rotunda of the Corcoran, Washington DC (now closed). 

 

She was bathed in the sound and motion of yet another human homage.

 

 

Views of Loop, 2000, mixed media with sound.  Jennifer Steinkamp (American born 1958) and Jimmy Johnson.  The Corcoran (closed in 2014), Washington, DC. 

Venus, a marble copy made by Thomas Hope (1769-1831, British) after Antonio Canova (1757-1822, Italian).  The Corcoran, Washington DC, 2014.

 

 

 

On the way to New York for even more tantalizing Venusian fare,  we stopped in Philadelphia for the goddess resplendent:

 

 

Venus and Cupid, oil on canvas

Batista Dossi, c. 1474-1548, Italian active Ferrara.  Philadelphia Art Museum from its website

Thought to be a portrait of a bride as Venus, both voluptuous and modest; a laurel tree beside her.

 

 

And here in New York  with her son: 

 

 

Venus Kissed by Cupid, oil on wood, c. 1555. 

Michele di Jacopo Tosini, 1503-1577, Florence, Italy.  Loaned in 2017/18 to the Metropolitan Museum, NY by the Galeria Colonna, Rome

One of more than 30 copies of an original  cartoon by Michelangelo dating to 1530 for execution by Jacopo da Pontormo for a client. 

The meaning of this image is not known.  Venus is removing an arrow from Cupid’s quiver.  What the man is doing hiding in a box on the left top of the image I do not know.

 

 

And here Venus and her son, cheeky now, are both holding up for all to see

 

the laurels of the sacred myrtle of her victory of survival and pre-eminence over her multi-century detractors.

 

 

 

Venus and Cupid, 1520’s, oil on canvas.

Lorenzo Lotto, 1480-1556, Venice.  Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY